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Submission + - Introducing Verto. A new open-source HTML5 based WebRTC project from FreeSWITCH (krisk.org)

Submitted by Anthony Minessale
Anthony Minessale writes: Connect any HTML5 application to FreeSWITCH and make calls, exchange events and leverage the power of stereo VoIP to create 3d positional conferences or any other voice-driven applications.

Learn more about the goals of the project from this open forum at PHONEWORD.org http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

We will also be demonstrating and giving presentations on Verto at ClueCon in just under 2 weeks. http://www.cluecon.com/

Comment Whew! No worries. Dilbert is still slightly ahead. (Score 2) 272

For a moment I was worried that Dilbert cartoon craziness was falling behind real-world craziness. I'm relieved that Dilbert is still ahead:
Most of us are only pretending to work while secretly hoping the project gets canceled after you get fired by the board.

Dilbert is not accurate, I think, about Microsoft. For Microsoft, the 6th panel,
"I expect the decline in morale to lead to violence"
should be
"I expect the decline in morale to lead to more decline in morale."

Comment Opinion: Satya Nadella is not a competent CEO. (Score 1) 272

It seems to me that anyone who says this, I synthesized our strategic direction..., is utterly incompetent at coordinating a large group. That is unthinking corporate-speak. It communicates non-verbally that he has no understanding of what is needed.

More:

"... realign our workforce..."

"... work toward synergies and strategic alignment..."

"... drive greater accountability..."

"... become more agile and move faster."

"... fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, ..."

"... flattening organizations..."

"... increasing the span of control of people managers."

"... our business processes and support models will be more lean and efficient with greater trust between teams."
Comment: Corporate-speak does not build trust, it destroys trust.

"... more productive, impactful teams..."

"Each organization is starting at different points and moving at different paces."
Comment: That is utterly obvious.

"We will realize the synergies..."

"... align to Microsoft's strategic direction."

"... we will focus on breakthrough innovation that expresses and enlivens..."

"... builds on our success in the affordable smartphone space..."

"... aligns with our focus..."

I'm very interested in the sociology of this. My understanding is that the Microsoft board of directors is utterly incompetent, has little understanding of technology, and merely chose the person to be CEO who was consistently most pleasant and ingratiating.

A competent CEO would not announce a huge advancement until it was already accomplished.

The sweeping changes Satya Nadella is announcing require huge amounts of research and understanding. It is simply not possible to accomplish successfully a re-organization of a huge company as though it were one action.

A competent top coordinator would announce a little at a time and provide meaningful and detailed explanation about why each change was necessary, and how decisions were made.

A competent top coordinator would make it clear that much of the wisdom of ideas about changes came from other people inside the company.

My opinions.

Submission + - Edward Snowden Says NSA Workers Pass Around Your Nude Photos

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: If you thought that nude photo you took of yourself was just for you and your significant other, you may be wrong. According to whistleblower Edward Snowden, young NSA employees occasionally get a hold of nude photos while searching through personal data and, if the person is attractive, the photos get passed around the office. Snowden explained how this happens to The Guardian during a 7-hour interview. Here's the relevant bit: You’ve got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old, they’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. Now in the course of their daily work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sense. For example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation, but they’re extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around and they show their coworker. And their coworker says ‘Oh hey, that’s great. Show it to Bill down the way.’ And then Bill sends it to George, George sends it to Tom, and sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people.

Submission + - How Hard Is It to Shoot Down a Plane? (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Ukrainian government officials say Russian-backed rebel forces shot down a Malaysian Airlines flight with 295 passengers and crew over the embattled border region on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The commercial flight was cruising at 33,000 feet, making it too high for a shoulder-launched missile and more likely that it was targeted by a radar-guided missile defense system, according to military experts. “It does seem depressingly likely,” said Mark Galeotti, a professor of global affairs at New York University currently studying Russian security issues in Moscow. “We know the rebels have the Buk missile system. We know they have shot down planes in the past. They may have believed it was a legitimate target.” Although the Buk system is designed to shoot down fast-moving military aircraft, a high-flying jetliner would have been an easy target. And although it would have been carrying a civilian transponder, if the anti-aircraft missile was being operated by a novice controller, mistakes were most likely made.

Submission + - 97% of U.S. Banks Allow Clickjacking Fraud. 44% Don't Even Use SSL. 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a financial industry software vendor, over 97% of U.S. Banks and Credit Unions Allow Clickjacking Fraud, and 44% Don't Even Use SSL. The report continues to break down the SSL usage and suggests that only 33.1% of institutions actually implement SSL correctly given a portion of the websites that do utilize HTTPS also allow a unsecured HTTP response.

Submission + - Disconnection of subscription through Comcast Customer Service

Submitted by Z00L00K
Z00L00K writes: A customer wanted to end his subscription by Comcast and recorded the call. It did take some interesting steps to even be allowed to end the subscription.

Please note: this conversation starts about 10 minutes in — by this point my wife and I are both completely flustered by the oppressiveness of the rep. So! Last week my wife called to disconnect our service with Comcast after we switched to another provider (Astound). We were transferred to cancellations (aka "customer retention"). The representative (name redacted) continued aggressively repeating his questions, despite the answers given, to the point where my wife became so visibly upset she handed me the phone. Overhearing the conversation, I knew this would not be very fun. ...

The conversation can be heard at Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ryan-bl...

Submission + - @Congressedits tweets anonymous Wikipedia edits from Capitol Hill (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Ed Summers, an open source Web developer, recently saw a friend tweet about Parliament WikiEdits, a UK Twitter “bot” that watched for anonymous Wikipedia edits coming from within the British Parliament’s internal networks. Summers was immediately inspired to do the same thing for the US Congress.

“The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful transparency tool,” Summers wrote in his personal blog. “So using my experience on a previous side project [Wikistream, a Web application that watches Wikipedia editing activity], I quickly put together a short program that listens to all major language Wikipedias for anonymous edits from Congressional IP address ranges and tweets them.”

The stream for the bot, @congressedits, went live a day later, and it now provides real-time tweets when anonymous edits of Wikipedia pages are made. Summers also posted the code to GitHub so that others interested in creating similar Twitter bots can riff on his work.

So far, @congressedits hasn’t caught anything scandalous; most of the edits caught have been stylistic changes rather than factual ones. The most interesting edit found so far was to the Wikipedia article on horse head masks—adding a reference to President Obama shaking hands with a man in such a mask on a recent trip to Denver.

Submission + - NSA Admits Retaining Snowden Emails, no FOIA for US press (matthewkeys.net)

Submitted by AHuxley
AHuxley writes: The http://thedesk.matthewkeys.net... reports on a FOIA request covering "... all e-mails sent by Edward Snowden"
Remember how Snowden should have raised his concerns with his superiors within the NSA?
Remember how no such communication could be found?
Remember how one such communication was released but did not seem to be raising direct concerns?
Well some record of e-mail communications seems to exist but they are exempt from public disclosure under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Submission + - In New Zealand The Right To Silence And Presumption Of Innocence Are In Danger (nzherald.co.nz)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: The New Zealand Herald reports, "Fundamental pillars of the criminal justice system may be eroded whichever party wins the election this year, as both National's and Labour's proposals would look into changing the right to silence or the presumption of innocence in rape cases. Both major parties claim the current system is not upholding justice for victims, and are looking at changes that would effectively make it easier for prosecutors to obtain convictions. National wants to explore allowing a judge or jury to see an accused's refusal to give evidence in a negative light, while Labour wants to shift the burden of proof of consent from the alleged victim to the accused."

Submission + - Magnetic Field of Earth Weakening a Sign Poles Are Flipping (guardianlv.com)

Submitted by Trachman
Trachman writes: The magnetic field of Earth is weakening more rapidly than many scientists thought it would, a sign that Earth’s magnetic poles might flip within a few hundred years as opposed to thousands of years. Data collected from Swarm, the collective name for three European Space Agency (ESA) satellites, confirms that Earth’s magnetic field is weakening, something which has led to many past switches in Earth’s magnetic poles.Deep ocean core studies have confirmed, according to NASA, that the Earth’s magnetic poles reverse on a relatively frequent basis. They usually switch anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 years. As it has been 700,000 years or so since a flip has taken place, Earth is overdue for one. The weakening magnetic field might be a sign that the switch will occur sooner, rather than later. Scientists, according to a report by LiveScience, had thought that Earth’s magnetic field was weakening by about five percent every hundred years. At that rate, they calculated that a flip in the Earth’s magnetic fields would not happen for around another 2,000 years. However, the new data from Swarm indicates that Earth’s magnetic field is actually currently weakening at a rate of five percent every decade instead of century. That rate is 10 times faster than the scientists had allowed for in their calculations about when the next flip would happen. That being said, we know that the Earth's magnetic field is primary protecting shield from cosmic particles and, consequently, is a primary factor to the Earth's temperature.

My Scoop is following: At the risk of being not popular here at Slashdot I dare to ask: can magnetic field changes and climate changes be connected and analyzed in concert?

Submission + - The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

Submitted by stephendavion
stephendavion writes: William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.

On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations.

“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

Submission + - Amazon seeks US exemption to test delivery drones (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Amazon.com has asked the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration permission to test drones outdoors for use in its Prime Air package delivery service. In the run up to launching the service, which aims to deliver packages in 30 minutes or less, the online retailer is developing aerial vehicles that travel over 50 miles (80 kilometers) per hour, and will carry 5pound (2.3 kilogram) payloads, which account for 86 percent of the products sold on Amazon.

Submission + - Hints of Life's Start Found in a Giant Virus (simonsfoundation.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the world of microbes, viruses are small — notoriously small. Pithovirus is not. The largest virus ever discovered, pithovirus is more massive than even some bacteria. Most viruses copy themselves by hijacking their host’s molecular machinery. But pithovirus is much more independent, possessing some replication machinery of its own. Pithovirus’s relatively large number of genes also differentiated it from other viruses, which are often genetically simple — the smallest have a mere four genes. Pithovirus has around 500 genes, and some are used for complex tasks such as making proteins and repairing and replicating DNA. “It was so different from what we were taught about viruses,” Abergel said.

The stunning find, first revealed in March, isn’t just expanding scientists’ notions of what a virus can be. It is reframing the debate over the origins of life.

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